A mum-of-two from Liverpool was in a coma for nearly a month after she plunged from a balcony at an Airbnb she was staying in while visiting Paris
A mum fell from the second floor balcony at an Airbnb and wasn’t found until the next day – during an idyllic holiday-turned-nightmare.
Raina Heverin, 42, was found badly injured in a courtyard by her horrified brother hours after she plunged from the balcony of a room she was staying in while in Paris, France. The mum-of-two had stayed in Paris for a weekend away but her life changed on April 26. She was rushed to the hospital in a serious condition after she was found the next morning. Rania suffered multiple injuries and remained in a coma in a French hospital for almost a month.
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Her husband, Michael, 45, said: “We think she had some kind of nightmare or sleep-walked, but she fell from the second floor balcony. She’d spent the day shopping and bought a new pair of running trainers.
“The following morning when her brother woke up, he went into her room because they had a day of sightseeing planned. She wasn’t in, and he thought she must have got up early and gone for a run, which wouldn’t have been unusual at all for her. But then he saw her trainers by the door.”
Raina, from Liverpool, suffered horror injuries including a broken arm, a broken hip, and lesions on her brain stem affecting her movement and speech, Liverpool Echo reports.
Michael, who rushed to Paris after hearing the terrifying news, said: “All told, she was in hospital for over two months.” She woke up from her coma on May 17.
Michael added: “We managed to get her back home on June 11, and she was in Whiston Hospital for a week, and then they transferred her to Broadgreen, and she’s still there now.
“Now she’s undergoing intense rehab. A lot of the neurological pathways have been severed. She had three lesions on her brain stem, one causing loss of sensation on the right side of her body, one affecting her left side, and one affecting her speech. She’s learning how to walk again, learning how to talk again. All those basic skills we use on a daily basis, she has to relearn all of that.”
Michael revealed how this horror incident has impacted his wife’s life, saying: “She can talk and she can string a sentence together, but she doesn’t sound like herself. She gets tired quickly. Talking can be exhausting for her. It will take years for her to get close to who she was physically.”
He added: “She’s gone from being a force of nature in Liverpool, an incredibly successful mum-of-two, and all of a sudden it’s ground to a halt and she’s struggling to come to terms with that.”
Raina, a recruiter who co-founded the SupplyWell teaching agency with her husband, hopes to secure a place at Oak Vale Gardens, a specialist brain injury rehabilitation centre in Broadgreen.
Her friend Rachel Bryan, who set up an online fundraiser to help Raina, said: “The road ahead is long, and Raina cannot do it alone. She will need ongoing continuous therapy and specialist equipment to rebuild her independence. Every rehabilitation session she needs cost over £100 an hour, and mobility aids and equipment run into the thousands.”
Michael said: “Our children are too young to understand the severity of what has happened, but they have adapted incredibly well. They’ve been really brave. They adapt to change more easily than grown-ups do and have taken it in their stride. We go to see her every day. We try to look at the positive side.”